Who are spitterati?

The term stands for celebrities who attend posh soirees organized to collect saliva for genetic sequencing. Simply put, it is a celebrity spit party. The term is a combination of the words ‘spit’ and ‘glitterati’. A start-up called 23andMe hosted the parties as a promotional tool for popularizing personal genomics. The marketing strategy first began in January, 2011 at the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when the company distributed a thousand free spit kits.